We, at Raxa had a nice outing to Qutub Golf Course on Friday evening. It was the first time for many of us. We spent time at driving range getting used to techniques of the game (Mind you, it is not as easy as it appears). Some of the pics:

Pic #1: Believe me, I was not posing for it :o

Pic #2: (L to R) Shuro (with cricket hat), Bhagirath, Melodie (others are clueless what z see doing), Sidhi (missing paparazzi moment), Me (with protruding stomach), John (smart ass of our office), Sharon (with her naughty smile), Sathyan (Design Team: out of frame) and probably Rishi (Drupal guy) too.

Pic #3: Another badly taken photo ;)

With the advent of so many online-course portals like Coursera, NPTEL, OnlineCourses, etc, I do feel online courses with strict schedules are way better than other online resources as the former one test you for whatever they teach with a strict deadline to submit the assignment.

I enrolled in 7 week course: M101P MongoDB for Developers (using Python) by 10gen which was a comprehensive course touching all aspects of Mongodb for developers including CRUD in mongodb, Performance, Schema Design, Aggregation, Cases studies,etc. I really appreciate Andrew Erlichson and his team for making a very nice learning resource.

BTW, they provide you a nice certificate too. :)

IEEE Global Humanitarian Conference 2012, Seattle, Washington, USA was a big opportunity for me to interact with lots of brightest minds of the world trying to solve one or the other humanitarian challenges in the world. I got to know about the conference about 8-10 months ago when I was in final year of my graduation. My final term project was going on well, when my mentor asked me to prepare a paper based on work and research done on the same. Well, it was my first attempt to write a paper. I still remember reading tons of papers, visiting places to talk to subjects and what not!! Because of abled guidance of Dr. Arvinder Kaur ma’am and Rahul Johari sir, I managed to complete paper and submit to GHTC 2012. Little did I ever imagine that they will accept my work and invite me to be a part of the conference at Seattle.

Oh! Let me mention what was the purpose of the paper. It was named: “Sahaaya: head-gesture recognising application for specially abled people”. I believe title is self explanatory. The idea of the whole project was to make sure life is easier for people who find it difficult to move their limbs or can’t speak. Hopefully, this project will bridge any communication gap b/w those specially abled people and his/her helper
To achieve this I used opencv library and java environment on linux (ubuntu) machine. The project has a long way to go for mass deployment. It has been a long time since I committed to the project or even updated my latest experiment with code on https://github.com/madanpiyush/Sahaaya/

Participation in GHTC 2012 was a great boost for me to contribute to humanitarian projects and code for the stuff that brings satisfaction. I wish to thank all organisers and participants of the conference a very best of luck for future and great work to make GHTC 2012 a grand success.

Blogpost on IEEE GHTC Blog (featuring me) :

http://ieeeghtc.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/happy-participated-at-qa-and-interviewed-attendees-ieeeghtc12/

http://ieeeghtc.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/track-humanitarian-challenges-and-opportunities-part-2-ieeeghtc12/

Few months of working with health related technologies has made me aware about the huge potential in this field. Shifting the focus of Electronic Medical Record from point-of-view of data entry to make it mobile is the next revolutionary thing. This (accompanied with machine learning) will bring lot of power in the hands of health providers to improve the health facilities and help them take better decisions. Currently, all patient related data is dug into files from where no analytics can be done to check patterns in health related data like disease pattern among various age / occupation / location group etc.

Thinking about a smart medical system, consider a lab system which takes photo from the medical equipments and smartly recognises the presence and shape of parasite (or anything that a trained human does) to conclude the test result (with verification from professional), thus saving lots of time of lab technicians. Also, consider an OPD system suggesting the doctor not to give a drug as patient was found allergic to the same in past. To adopt such smart features we need to adopt a strict concept dictionary (with detailed hierarchy levels especially in diagnosis). Such smart features can be shared also between various EMRs, though the major challenge here will be making all those EMRs agree on same concept dictionary which must be linked to standard (MVP-CEIL) dictionaries like RxNorm (includes drug vocabularies), LOINC (standard for lab observation) , SNOMED CT (processable collection of medical terms) , ICD-10 (medical classification by WHO), etc. With great power comes great responsibility, here it is patient privacy concerns which includes not showing critical health records to those who may misuse it , providing anonymous test procedure for HIV Tests etc.

Today apart from providing splendid services, the open source world has to look after legal aspects of the same. Here,we give thumbs-up to Sflc, an awesome organisation which promotes open source by providing free professional legal advice to opensource products.

Here at Raxa, we are always motivated to achieve these goals and contribute to gift everyone the most precious thing ie healthy life.

It’s the time to give you long pending update on my GSoC project. As I write this from my new laptop (Mid Term Evaluation gift to myself ;) ), I have completed major part of my project : basic Lab Module for Raxa EMR and Registration Module. Currently, there is no effective way of integrating comprehensive Lab tasks with OpenMRS, which is one of the largest open source Medical Record System and the one with which we share datamodel. My project will allow laboratory to be a part of point-of-care system which will be first implemented at JSS, Chattisgarh, India very soon. My GSoC Project includes development of Registration and Basic Lab Module using the REST Services of OpenMRS and Sencha Framework. Though majority of task in Registration is over, printing of registration card and improving look and feel of UI is under way. Basic Laboratory module can create lab orders and allow lab technicians to enter the data. This is the very beginning of what we desire to achieve including analysis of lab results to get disease patterns , automation of laboratory after integration with lab equipments, providing best health related information to patients and so much more. This project gives me a satisfaction that my contribution to code will improve the life of so many people and I’m lovin’ it ;)

It was July 14, 12:38 am IST when I received the following mail from Google-Melange:

It is the time to gear up for upcoming Midterm evaluation for GSoC, which is due on 9th July. After work on Registration Module was over (printing of Registration card is done, but yet to be integrated), I moved on to Laboratory module. Roger explained me how we extended OpenMRS datamodel to make it work for Lab Module. Martin helped to create a test instance of OpenMRS which I will be using throughout the development.

As all the views of Lab Modules are over, I focus to create “working” reusable components which can be shared among various views. Currently working on component which lists all the lab orders (HOST+/ws/rest/v1/order?type=laborder). As GET call on laborder is giving problem & is being fixed by Roger & Martin, I decided to use drug order (HOST+/ws/rest/v1/order?type=drugorder) , which will be changed to lab order at later stage when call on laborder is working fine. The main reason of choosing drugorder was that both (laborder & drugorder) are derived from order class. The component successfully shows list of drug orders (after creating model & store which auto syncs on load & data is shown in gridpanel) , but combining the columns into one is tricky (but it is UI/UX requirement). I plan to invest some time in this component as it will be used in most of the views. Hope to provide something good by end of the week. :)

Great news from Canonical, there was whooping 160% increase in Ubuntu users from India in last one year. My first encounter with Ubuntu was about 5 years back. Those were the days of Feisty Fawn (code name of Ubuntu 7.04) It was love at first sight! Within days, I permanently migrated to Ubuntu from Windows (and made many others do that too :P). After trying out dozens of distros and lots of desktop environments, I found Ubuntu 10.10 to be one of the best (I am still using it on my 5 year old laptop). Though I am a loyal Ubuntu fan, I’m not too fond of Unity which became the default environment since Ubuntu 11.04. Of course, the power of Linux lets you customize it to levels I wouldn’t even have dreamt of before. Well… I should now stop the endless song of Linux praises, and congratulate everyone who believes in Open Source and Linux :)

One Month at Raxa has been a great learning experience for me. During this period, I have mainly worked on the Registration Module & just started with the Laboratory Module. Before joining, I familiarized myself with REST services, HTML5, Sencha Touch, Sencha ExtJS, OpenMRS etc. and already worked on hacking some part of Registration in Sencha Touch. Soon, we started working on Registration Module in Sencha ExtJS, I created views & controller of the same as well as implemented AJAX calls for REST services provided by OpenMRS (this is what most of my project does). Meanwhile, OpenMRS released version 1.9 which we quickly updated to for our project development. Registration Module was not very complex, but changing of designs/requirements always kept me on my toes. I also created a few functionalities which will be shared across various modules.